Posts Tagged ‘Lounge’

In Lounge, the weekend section of the business paper Mint, the columnist Aakar Patel doffs his hat to Prakash Belawadi, the Bangalore engineer who became an Indian Express reporter, who became a magazine correspondent, who became a television chat show host, who launched a journalism school, who launched a weekly newspaper…

Who made a national-award winning English film, who makes a hit TV serial—and who is winning accolades for his role as a Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) agent in the just-released Hindi film, Madras Cafe:

“Prakash Belawadi started and edited a weekly newspaper, Bangalore Bias (it shut down). He has begun so many enterprises, a media school among them, that I have lost count just of those he has been involved in since 2000, and would not be surprised if he has too.

“Belawadi began his career as a journalist and worked for Vir Sanghvi’s Sunday. He remains a columnist and a first rate one. He has the best quality a columnist can have and that, according to Graham Greene, is never to be boring.

“Belawadi has a dangerous lack of ideology that makes him an aggressive and unpredictable debater. He can casually assume a position, often contrary to one he held a couple of days ago, and unpack a ferocious argument. Like all good men, he likes a fight, and like all good men it is promptly forgotten. He has a quality that is admirable among men.

“He is restless and tireless, and totally uncaring for the middle-class ambitions that most of us cannot let go of, and few of us ever achieve.”

Priya Ramani, editor of Lounge, the Saturday section of the business paper, Mint:

“For residents of south Mumbai, in a faraway time before Arvind Kejriwal and Arnab Goswami, the taxi driver was this somnolent constituency’s only link to national politicking.

“In the short drive from Nariman Point to Malabar Hill, the Navbharat Times and Yashobhoomi reading taxi driver could introduce you to his India, one where citizens didn’t pay taxes and yet knew exactly what the government had been up to.

“His Mayawati vs Mulayam Singh monologue was tailored to the duration of your drive and the level of your interest. God forbid some English newspapers had convinced you that life in Bihar had improved dramatically with the rise of Nitish Kumar, he could easily provide the counter view.

“If it was your lucky day, he would dismiss the idea of a Hindu Rashtra with a cynical: All these political parties are useless. Everyone’s a %*@#%. If not, oh well, it was a healthy debate, certainly more so than those snappy Twitter altercations.”

Raj Kumar Gupta, the director of last weekend’s multiplex marvel—in which Rani Mukherji essays the role of a single, bitchy, aggressive, passionate, foul-mouthed, investigative journalist probing the murder of the model Jessica Lal at a Delhi bar—may have made the world believe that his ‘wet dream’ was NDTV’s Barkha Dutt.

But, writes Priya Ramani, the editor of Lounge, the Saturday section of Mint, the sting operation that was key to the reopening of the Jessica Lal murder case was not Dutt’s (or NDTV’s) handiwork, but of Harinder Baweja’s (and Tehelka‘s). And, Baweja gets no credit in the movie whatsoever.

Writes Ramani:

“What a guy, I thought when I read Harinder Baweja’s riveting post-Babri Masjid expose in India Today magazine in 1993.

“The Bharatiya Janata Party was then claiming the demolition of the mosque was nothing compared to the 40 temples that had been razed in Kashmir. Ask them for a list, editor Aroon Purie told Baweja, and go see if the temples have actually been destroyed.

“It was January and snowing in a turbulent Kashmir as Baweja and a photographer trudged from one temple to another—and found all of them intact. They were nearly kidnapped by AK-47 wielding men; at another temple they had to face a mob and firing.

“When I met Baweja a few years later, he turned out to be a she. A 5ft, 1-inch she who prefers to be called Shammy and always wears saris with sexy, sleeveless blouses in summer and winter. When the Taliban captured Kabul, Shammy almost travelled there with her sleeveless blouses.

“Shammy is also the perfect host and believes her parties are a hit only if dinner is served after midnight.”

“The hotshot editor whose work I had worshipped growing up said he would meet me at his hotel at 7pm. When I got to the hotel, I called him on the house phone and he said, come on up.

“I shuffled around nervously for a couple of minutes in the lobby, torn between the eagerness of a 23-year-old to meet one of her journalism heroes and the thought that it was perhaps best to walk away from the job. He interviewed me over drinks besides the bed in his tiny room that was made up for the night.

“He was charming, he flirted, and I pretended not to recognize the signals. Eventually, I escaped unscathed. It was my first lesson on surviving the workplace.”

Indian media doesn’t know. That is the conclusion that has been reached by Aakar Patel, formerly of Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, Mid-Day and Divya Bhaskar, as he tears into the Indian media in a column in Lounge, the Saturday supplement of the business daily Mint.

Indian journalists do not know how to ask questions. Indian journalists look for validation of their views rather than fresh information. Indian newspaper proprietors are more knowledgeable than editors. Indian writers are rarely asked to write for publications abroad because they are so bad.

And, since he is writing in a business paper, Patel takes care not to bite the hand that feeds.

“There are good journalists in India, but they tend to be business journalists. Unlike regular journalism, business journalism is removed from emotion because it reports numbers. There is little subjectivity and business channel anchors are calm and rarely agitated because their world is more transparent.

“Competent business reporting here, like CNBC, can be as good as business reporting in the West. This isn’t true of regular journalism in India, which is uniformly second rate….

“You could read Indian newspapers every day for 30 years and still not know why India is this way. The job of newspapers is, or is supposed to be, to tell its readers five things: who, when, where, what and why. Most newspapers make do with only three of these and are unlikely to really you ‘what’….”